8 leading European organisations join forces to bring together RISC-V and SYCL standards to demonstrate ground-breaking advances in scalability of extreme data analytics via fully-open AI acceleration

The wide-spread adoption of AI has resulted in a market for novel hardware accelerators that can efficiently process AI workloads. Unfortunately, all popular AI accelerators today use proprietary hardware—software stacks, leading to a monopolization of the acceleration market by a few large industry players.

Eight leading European organizations have joined in an effort to break this monopoly via Horizon Europe project SYCLOPS (Scaling extreme analYtics with Cross-architecture acceleration based on Open Standards). The vision of SYCLOPS is to democratize AI acceleration using open standards, and enabling a healthy, competitive, innovation-driven ecosystem for Europe and beyond. This vision relies on the convergence of two important trends in the industry: (i) the standardization and adoption of RISC-V®, a free, open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), for AI and analytics acceleration, and (ii) the emergence and growth of SYCL™ as a cross-vendor, cross-architecture, data parallel programming model for all types of accelerators, including RISC-V.